Tuesday, October 02, 2012

CNN has Obama +3...in a poll that is D+8.

Fifty-percent of likely voters questioned in the CNN survey, which was released Monday, say that if the election were held today, they would vote for the president, with 47% saying they would support Romney, the former Massachusetts governor. The president's three point margin is within the poll's sampling error.

...this latest CNN poll has Romney leading among Independents by 8 points but losing to Barack Obama by 3 points. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the poll is weighted with a Democrat + 8 advantage for Obama.

I noted this morning that the scarcity of details about a Washington Post/ABC News poll showing Mitt Romney trailing President Obama by 11 points in swing states meant the results should be taken with some skepticism. Well, now Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin reports on why those results should be taken carefully: “As I learned from Post pollster Jon Cohen, that finding is based on the responses of a total of 160 people, and it has a margin of error of 8 percentage points.”

The Romney campaign is experiencing what some officials believe could be the beginning of a mass exodus of big money donors diverting their cash away from the Republican presidential hopeful and toward Republican candidates for the House and Senate races more likely to win in November, the FOX Business Network has learned.But another person with direct knowledge of the matter says the trend...reflects an increasing degree of anxiety both with what they believe is the tentative nature of the Romney campaign, and recent poll numbers that show President Obama with a lead, particularly in key battleground states, that some Republican contributors are starting to believe is insurmountable.

There's one other variable to these polls, however. One that the the Republican establishment ignores, that the donor base is ignorant of, and that the media refuses to believes even exists:

...a new Associated Press poll shows tea party supporters may have the last laugh in November.The AP/GFK poll shows that 31% of likely voters consider themselves Tea Party supporters. With 131 million votes cast in the 2008 elections, that translates into an incredible voting bloc of 41 million Tea Party supporters waiting to cast ballots. These voters have already made their voices heard in Wisconsin earlier this year, as well as in Republican primaries in Texas and Nebraska.

That 31% of likely voters figure is greater than the 19% who described themselves as either strongly or somewhat liberal...

My prediction? After the 2012 election, pollsters will have about as much credibility with the public as the mainstream media they currently serve...

UPDATE:Ann Althouse notes that the D+8 skew is less than the D+15 that CNN used in their previous poll, and implies a return to the D+15 metric immediately after the debate, to "prove" Obama was perceived as a winner...

Of course, they might just want to create an impression of a tight race - for ratings purposes - and go back to the 'Obama landslide" 7-10 days prior to election day, in the hopes of depressing the vote...